With a bruised heart I have to report to AWG members that our dear colleague Jeff Truman has delivered his last script.
Tragically, Jeff suffered a massive brain bleed last Sunday and passed away on Tuesday 2nd December without waking up. He was 57.
Jeff was one of the television industry’s true professionals. Over a career spanning more than 30 years he wrote almost 200 hours of produced drama – everything from Neighbours, for which he contributed over 100 episodes, to the new Seven Network crime drama Winter and, most recently, Doctor Blake. His scripts for Fat Tony & Co were widely considered to be the pick of the series, and in 2013 he took home a long overdue AWGIE for his fine work on Underbelly Badness. Any way you look at it, until two days ago Jeff Truman was working at the height of his powers.
Jeff was a writer who always delivered, both in terms of making the deadline, no matter what, and nailing the brief. He had the happy knack of getting the characters and tone right first time. No doubt his wide and varied experience as an actor informed his creation of character but it was his enquiring mind and many extra-curricular interests that gave his scripts added dimension and that particular Truman sparkle. Who knew mathematics was one of those passions? If you wanted to get a rise out of Jeff you only had to suggest the Fibonacci sequence was just a bunch of numbers.
Jeff was a terrific cook. And a red-hot flower arranger. And a student pilot. And, famously, the life of any party, drunk or sober.
He was also a loving husband and the proudest father who ever lived.
But it’s Jeff in the writers’ room I will remember with most affection. He was the ultimate team player, always constructive, always putting the show first and his own episodes second, and always fun, funny, warm and generous – if a bit rude and crude occasionally! But that was all in the name of entertainment.
Our world is the poorer for Jeff’s untimely passing.
The Truman Show is over.
Vale Jeff. Missing you already, buddy.
*Item posted on the AWG website
The funeral will be held this Friday at 10.30am at the Camellia Chapel at Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium, corner of Delhi and Plassey Roads, North Ryde.